Anchoring the FSF in its values
Quoting: Anchoring the FSF in its values —
An obvious option, used by many organizations, was to let supporters sign up as members and have the members' votes control everything about the organization.
We rejected that approach because it would have made the organization vulnerable to being taken over by people who disagreed with its mission. If a large fraction of the free software user community disagrees with us in a particular way, it would be no surprise if many of them joined the organization, with or without any particular plan, and then voted to change the mission. Governments must be democratic because they exercise broad power over people, but activist organizations should be steady in their mission.
Already in 1985, we could see that many of the people who appreciated the GNU Project's work (developing useful GNU software packages) did not support our goal and values. To look at software issues in terms of freedom was radical and many were reluctant to consider it, so they continued to evaluate programs based on practical convenience. If the FSF were member-governed, it would soon have hundreds of members who considered our goals and values unimportant and would vote to dispense with them -- if they could. To avoid that sad end, we had to design the organization not to be vulnerable to this danger.
So we chose a structure whereby the FSF's governing body would appoint new people to itself.